I Flying by Finuala Dowling
Reviewed by Dr Mary West (NMMU)
Finuala Dowling, in her debut collection of poems, I Flying (Carapace, 2002), provides a fine example of an emerging crop of contemporary South African poets who are re-discovering the ambivalent and the multi-dimensional in the ordinary. Her poems, which are largely personal, are lyrical encounters with the seemingly trivial domestic moments that a white middle-aged South African single mother might undergo, or might have undergone, during the course of everyday life. But they are also so much more. Collectively and individually the poems offer a provocative record of the social and political disjunctions that inform those routine experiences, the ambivalences that shape them, the courage needed to endure them, and the wry distance needed to describe them in a way that reveals what ordinariness tends to conceal.
The collection takes on everything and the kitchen table, and “Kitchen Table” in particular demonstrates Dowling’s ability to tap into an aspect of ordinary everyday living to find the histories and the hurts hidden beneath the surface. Dowling remembers the kitchen table being transformed into a “chopping block” where her mother “decapitated all traitors and / heartbreakers with her onion knife,” and that same kitchen table being “the station of every departure and / every return …”. I remember, with her, the ingrained contours of it and of everywhiteperson growing up in South Africa being brought bread by the nanny.
The title, I Flying, taken from the first poem which depicts a family outing, repeats the words ascribed to a toddler while being pushed very fast in his pram. In addition to echoing the name of the poet and thus hinting at the autobiographical underpinning of the collection, the fledgling ‘english’ of the phrase encapsulates the fledgling hope that so many of the poems articulate, that in the midst of despair there exists the possibility of redemption, however compromised. Two poems in particular exhibit this ambivalence, namely, “Repair” and “To the doctor who treated the raped baby and who felt such despair.” “Repair” is a beautifully captured moment in which Dowling treats the unremarkable subject of putting an over-tired child to sleep. What gives the poem its power is that the incident is observed by those whose own “irreparable loss” is absorbed into the comfort of the moment. “To the doctor …” is a poem that works by juxtaposing the ordinary and the extraordinary. While the doctor cleans and staunches the open wounds inflicted by such violence, somewhere someone is comforting a baby, including a “Karoo shepherd croon[ing] a ramkietjie lullaby / in the veld ...” .
For me, one of the finest poems is “Nine kinds of silence,” the last poem in the collection. Each is a silence that reveals the limits of language and communication, which Dowling expresses, ironically, by using words with such care and control. Another is “I am sorry but I have to go because” where the poet self-consciously and courageously admits, amongst other things, that she is forced to speak “allusively about things that are / absolutely real” thus revealing the mechanisms governing the writing poetry and simultaneously the mechanisms that dictate the way we love and hate.
This is an astounding achievement for a debut publication which was justifiably rewarded with the Ingrid Jonker Prize for a first volume. Finuala Dowling has three more publications to watch out for: her second collection of poems entitled Doo-wah Girl of the Universe (Penguin, 2006), her first novel, What Poets Need (Penguin, 2005), and her latest novel, Flyleaf (Penguin, 2007).
